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Coming out for Pink

Thanks to lots of comments on my previous blog post about color schemes, I’ve made things Moar Pink. If you’re not yet ready to destroy that color, here’s the start of the (pink) art.

Icons have been pinkified — where you can see that some are resistant like the battery and SELinux — a little more harmony has been created between the colors. Notice that the icons do become a little monochrome like this (or is it bichrome?) because the color nuances are smashed flat with a pink hammer. I’ve also added a custom Konqueror stylesheet to keep things pink when visited websites don’t have anything set. There’s still some uncomfortable blue in links (also in Blogilo) and message counts (KMail). And of course KMail still has the blue swoosh while switching folders — I can’t see that that is configurable anywhere.

Olaf points out that there was work done on system-color-settings compatible color schemes for some applications. That’s definitely something to keep in mind.

Now, this exercise isn’t just about being horrifyingly pink. I came up with a few usage scenarios where easy-to-do global appearance updates are interesting:

Distribution branding. I know, most ditro’s do this by hand already. But having a good checklist of where to look and what to modify would make it easier on them. Plus, you could then publish, say, the Fedora look and make it easy to install onto any KDE desktop installation.

"Hey, your desktop is cool, can I have that?"

Quick user switching.

Activity customization.

Environment-aware computing. When you move your laptop outside, the color scheme changes and everything becomes higher-contrast and more sharply defined. Like the n900′s keyboard lights up in the dark, but now for wallpapers and color schemes.

Pretending that your video cable is damaged so that one color drops out.

I so need to start a TechBase article on colorizing and global appearance customization.